Ocala Website Server – Overly Sensitive Firewall.

If you are receiving this, you have a website hosted/created by Ocala Website Designs LLC. You may have seen some interrupted services last night.

The server became inaccessible, intermittently, last night between 3 p.m. till about 10 p.m. It was unrelated to the ongoing maintenance and security updates.

I thought the server was receiving a denial of service attack, or my worse fear, the latest version of WordPress may have come with a zero-day exploit. After being on the phone with support for an hour or two tweaking settings and scanning for malware/rootkits, we came to the conclusion that the server was just overly secure and was denying/blocking all traffic on its own. Apparently the firewall’s settings, after an automatic update, became overly sensitive.

The good thing is, a really respectable support technician told me that the server is 10 times more secure than others they see, and had very sophisticated security rules. I think we have it worked out now and I’m continuing to monitor it today.

Sorry for the inconvenience. This was the first time the server has had an issue, since I created it more than a year ago. Fortunately, it was due to being overly secure, rather than being exploited.